Mixed Race Studies

You Do Not Belong Here

KR Online
Kenyon Review
September 2017

Jaquira Díaz
Gambier, Ohio
June 2017

A few years ago, during a summer in Puerto Rico, I went back to my old neighborhood, El Caserío Padre Rivera. When I was a girl, El Caserío, one of the island’s government housing projects, was a world of men, of violence. A world that at times wasn’t safe for women or girls. There were shootouts in the streets, fourteen-year-old boys carrying guns as they rode their bikes to the candy store just outside the walls. We watched a guy get stabbed right in front of our building once, watched the cops come in and raid places for drugs and guns. Outsiders were not welcome. Outsiders meant trouble.

What you didn’t know unless you lived there, unless you spent time there, was that most people in El Caserío were just trying to raise their families in peace, like anywhere else. The neighbors kept an eye on all the kids, fed them, took them to school, took them trick-or-treating on Halloween. All over the neighborhood, people told stories. El Caserío was where I learned about danger and violence and death, but it was also where I learned about community, where I learned to love stories, to imagine them, to dream. And it’s a place I love fiercely.

That summer, I drove into El Caserío to look at our old apartment, my first elementary school, the basketball courts where my father taught me to shoot hoops. I’d been there less than five minutes when a boy on a bike approached the car, motioned for me to roll down my window.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Just visiting,” I said. “I was born here.”

He kept his hands on the handlebars, looked inside the car for a while, then gave me directions to the nearest exit, even though I hadn’t asked for them. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

“I know my way around,” I said. “I used to live here.”

“You do not belong here,” he said, then pedaled away, disappearing around the corner…

Read the entire article here.

Killing Us Softly With the US Colonial Song: Puerto Ricans Matter

Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches: Musings on My Tri-racial Black and Puerto Rican Ancestry
2017-12-31

Teresa Vega

On Becoming Comfortable with My Rice & Beans & Collard Greens Self

On December 27th, 2013, I wrote one of my first blogposts about what it meant to find my Boricua Branches — my father’s side of my family. I will always say, without an ounce of hesitation, that the best part of taking my DNA tests was finding my Puerto Rican cousins. My father’s absence for 20 years of my life — from the age of 3-years old until 23-years old — resulted in a critical disjuncture in how I saw myself. While I always knew I was half-Puerto Rican, my pre-23 year old self did not know what that meant having been born and raised in Brockton, MA, a suburb of Boston. Brockton was not the diverse community it is today when I was growing up. It was a predominately white community with a small African-American and Cape Verdean population. We were often seen as Black and sometimes as Cape Verdean. Pre-23-year old Teresa was definitely Black culturally-identified. Though I always knew I had a diverse maternal extended family and equally diverse ancestors, having been raised by my maternal grandparents, I grew up within the confines of an African-American community.

I arrived in New York City in the Fall of 1990 to attend graduate school in a city that had one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico. With a name like Teresa A. Vega, I had a hard time convincing anyone that I was anything other than a Latina. People assumed that I was either in denial about being a Latina or had some sort of hangup about speaking Spanish. It never occurred to most people that maybe I didn’t grow up with my Puerto Rican father, that maybe Spanish wasn’t my first language, or maybe I was raised in a place that didn’t have a Latino community…

Read the entire article here.

The Conversation I’ve Been Dreading: Ijeoma Oluo Talks About Race with Her Mom

Literary Hub
2018-01-17

Ijeoma Oluo

‘At this point I’m regretting the invention of the telephone.’

From So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

When my white mother gave birth to me, and later my brother, in Denton, Texas, she became the subject of a lot of racial commentary in her conservative southern community. But surprisingly, my mother and I had our first really substantive conversation about race late in my life, when I was 34 years old. I was well into my career in writing about culture and social justice and my opinions and identity around race were pretty well documented by then. But the truth is, like many families, our conversations growing up mostly revolved around homework, TV shows, and chores.

While I was growing up, my mother had given the obligatory speeches that all parents of black children must give: don’t challenge cops, don’t be surprised if you are followed at stores, some people will be mean to you because of your beautiful brown skin, no you can’t have the same hairstyle as your friends because your hair doesn’t do that. But those conversations were one-offs that ceased to be necessary once we were old enough to see the reality of race for ourselves.

Having a white mother, my siblings and I likely had even fewer conversations about race than black children raised by black parents, because there was a lot about our lives that our mother’s whiteness made it hard for her to see. My mother loved our blackness as much as was possible for any nonblack person to do, she loved our brown skin, our kinky hair, our full lips, our culture, and our history. She thought we were beauty incarnate…

Read the entire article here.

Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

Basic Books
2017-12-05
480 pages
6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9780201510355
eBook ISBN 13: 9780201626636

Jacqueline Jones, Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History
University of Texas, Austin

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived

Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket “martyr” Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and one of the most prominent figures of African descent of her era. And yet, her life was riddled with contradictions-she advocated violence without apology, concocted a Hispanic-Indian identity for herself, and ignored the plight of African Americans.

Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Jacqueline Jones presents not only the exceptional life of the famous American-born anarchist but also an authoritative account of her times-from slavery through the Great Depression.

Let’s Talk About Whiteness

On Being
2017-01-19

Krista Tippett, Host/Executive Producer

Eula Biss, Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Image by Ann Hamilton

Could we learn to talk about whiteness? The writer Eula Biss has been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — but also how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.

Listen to the interview (00:51:21) here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

Lucy Parsons bio reveals new facts about the birth, ethnicity of the ‘Goddess of Anarchy’

The Chicago Tribune
2017-11-15

Mark Jacob, Metro Editor

A new biography of Lucy Parsons reveals new facts about her life. Photo courtesy of the Lucy Parsons Project/Justice Design (/ LUCY PARSONS PROJECT)

Lucy Parsons, an anarchist firebrand who was one of the most enigmatic Chicagoans ever, might fit in better today than she did during her own time a century ago.

She was a black woman married to a white man. Scandalous then, no big thing now…

She favored an eight-hour workday and a social safety net, positions that made her a radical in the late 1800s but would qualify her for Congress today.

And Parsons had another trait of today’s politicians: She was a merchant of misinformation.

“Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” is an important new biography by University of Texas historian Jacqueline Jones that fact-checks Parsons’ made-up details about her own background, correcting errors existing in virtually every biographical sketch ever written about this amazing woman…

Read the entire article here.

The quest for racial validity

The Berkeley Beacon
Boston, Massachusetts
2017-11-02

Elise Chen, Beacon Correspondent

I identify as a person of color, but in the fight for racial justice I often feel more like an ally than a member of the POC community.

I’m biracial—Chinese on my dad’s side, European descent on my mom’s. As I navigate through the world, I usually pass as white, which provides me with privileges most of my POC peers don’t have. I understand I have a responsibility to use this privilege as a tool to amplify the voices of people who continue to be silenced.

In many POC communities, members are encouraged to prioritize the voices of those within the group who are most marginalized. They often discourage centering whiteness in conversations, because it’s exhausting for members to hear about white people again when so much of life already revolves around the systemic inequality created and upheld by white people.

But when you’re a POC whose existence does, in fact, center on whiteness, it can feel isolating…

Read the entire article here.

Love, Alone, Will Not Dismantle Racism

Girl Mob
2017-11-13

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Actor/Producer/Educator

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

For the last four years I have traveled across the globe presenting my one-woman show, One Drop of Love. The first two words of the play’s title refer to the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule was created to determine the amount of Sub-Saharan African blood necessary (‘one drop’) to justify enslaving and otherwise stripping away the rights of a person. These words in my title symbolize the historical and systemic racism inherent in the United States. I end the title and the play with the word love – for the hope I carry that we, collectively, will commit ourselves to dismantling this system. However, after the show, some audience members cling to the last word—love—while seemingly ignoring the first two.

While love may be helpful in change-making, there is necessary work to do before expecting people disenfranchised by racism to love their way to change—we must insist on truth and justice first…

Read the entire article here.

Citizen of The Year: Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced

Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ)
2017-11-13

The Editors

He’s been vilified by millions and locked out of the NFL—all because he took a knee to protest police brutality. But Colin Kaepernick’s determined stand puts him in rare company in sports history: Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson—athletes who risked everything to make a difference.

In 2013, Colin Kaepernick was on the cover of this magazine because he was one of the best football players in the world. In 2017, Colin Kaepernick is on GQ’s cover once again—but this time it is because he isn’t playing football. And it’s not because he’s hurt, or because he’s broken any rules, or because he’s not good enough. Approximately 90 men are currently employed as quarterbacks in the NFL, as either starters or reserves, and Colin Kaepernick is better—indisputably, undeniably, flat-out better—than at least 70 of them. He is still, to this day, one of the most gifted quarterbacks on earth. And yet he has been locked out of the game he loves—blackballed—because of one simple gesture: He knelt during the playing of our national anthem. And he did it for a clear reason, one that has been lost in the yearlong storm that followed. He did it to protest systemic oppression and, more specifically, as he said repeatedly at the time, police brutality toward black people.

When we began discussing this GQ cover with Colin earlier this fall, he told us the reason he wanted to participate is that he wants to reclaim the narrative of his protest, which has been hijacked by a president eager to make this moment about himself. But Colin also made it clear to us that he intended to remain silent. As his public identity has begun to shift from football star to embattled activist, he has grown wise to the power of his silence. It has helped his story go around the world. It has even provoked the ire and ill temper of Donald Trump. Why talk now, when your detractors will only twist your words and use them against you? Why speak now, when silence has done so much?

At the same time, Colin is all too aware that silence creates a vacuum, and that if it doesn’t get filled somehow, someone else will fill it for him. In our many conversations with Colin about this project, we discussed the history of athletes and civil rights, and the indelible moments it called to mind, and we decided that we’d use photography—the power of imagery and iconography—to do the talking…

Read the entire article here.

The one woman show

The New Indian Express
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
2017-10-14

Ablnaya Kalyanasundaram, Chennai Express

• Natasha Marshall’s solo play Half-breed aims to start a social discussion about racism
• She also attempts to reach out to victims of racism through her 60-minute play

Chennai: Racism, whether casual or blatant, is a difficult topic to express by those on the receiving end. Despair at the unfairness of it and a perpetual burning question of ‘Why me?’ prevents many from expressing anger and standing up against it. Born in a small village in Wiltshire, England, in a predominantly white area, Natasha Marshall has come a long way from the ostracised young girl to award-shortlisted playwright and actor. In the city to tell us her story through theatre, she speaks to CE about Half-breed.

Half-breed started as a three-minute poem. Natasha used to perform the poem at open mic nights and poetry nights in London. Gradually she built it to a play, thanks to a writing programme with two theatre groups, Soho theatre and Talawa Theatre Company, the co-producers of Half-breed. “I was a 26-year old, who moved back home to live with my grandma. I felt lost. I decided to write the play, and all I wanted was for someone to give me a chance, and they did. This play has literally changed my life in many ways,” Natasha smiles.

A one woman show, Natasha combines a total of seven characters in the 60-minute play. She plays the role of Jasmine, a young mixed-race woman who lives in a little village in the west of England, with dreams of becoming an actor; she is also the racist character. “I play my whole village. I play the racist and also the woman facing it. I think that makes the show more interesting and delivers a stronger message,” she quips. “I feel all the characters are a piece of me. Ultimately nobody’s perfect — we all can say ignorant things.”…

Read the entire article here.